Ben Russell Movies

On the island of Tanna, a part of Vanuatu, an archipelago in Melanesia, strange rites are enacted and time passes slowly while the inhabitants await...

A documentary portrait of Utopia, loosely framed by Plato’s invocation of the lost continent of Atlantis in 360 BC and its re-resurrection via...

Direct Action documents the everyday of one of the most important activist communities in France in order to see how the success of a radical protest...

A man at three disparate moments in his life: as a member of a fifteen-person collective on a small Estonian island, alone in the wilderness of...

The film traces the extensive journey of two unidentified brothers who venture from the outskirts of Paramaribo, Suriname, on land and through...

'Set between Swaziland and South Africa, in a region still struggling with the divisions produced by an apartheid government, Greetings to the...

An ethnographic field report in which the Anthropologist describes the mythic creation of an unnamed ‘sun-scraping structure’ through the...

This film is an homage to the Gaza Strip and to the possibility of hope beyond hopelessness. Ouroboros, the symbol of the snake eating its tail, is...

Using a 35mm strip of motion picture slug featuring the recently deceased American comedian Richard Pryor, this extended Rorschach assault on the...

Terra Incognita is a lensless film whose cloudy pinhole images create a memory of history. Ancient and modern explorer texts of Easter Island are...

"TRYPPS #7 (BADLANDS) charts, through an intimate long-take, a young woman's LSD trip in the Badlands National Park before descending into a...

Shot in the abandoned buildings of Gary, Indiana and the cornfields of Western Illinois, The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid presents a fractured...

A color-separation portrait of the Exarchia neighborhood of Athens, Greece, made during the Anti-Austerity protests in late 2011. In a place thick...

115 years later, a(nother) remake of the Lumiere Brothers pseudo-actuality film La Sortie des usines Lumière. This time around our factory is...

A giant pot is ascending from the sky. Twenty winsome damsels are landing on planet earth, coming out of the pot filled with two-hundred and eighty...

(3:00, video, color, sound, 2009) A closely hewn remake of the first half of Viennese Actionist (and convicted sex offender) Otto Muehl's 1967 film...

Trance dance and water implosion, a line drawn between secular freak-outs and religious phenomena. Shot in a single-take at a sacred site on the...

An ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation’s sixteenth president.

A speculative portrait of a Dutchman living in the Surinamese jungle - fixing canoe motors, accused of eating the locals' children.

Culled from four rolls of Super-8 film shot while the maker was a development worker in a small South American village, Daumë is at its center a...